That depends heavily on your benchmark opinion. It is not materially worse than any other White Castle you have ever been served.

WHITE CASTLE VENDING MACHINE

Some personal news

"Four years later, the two men managed to botch the simple task of reciting the presidential oath at Mr. Obama’s first inauguration."

AYFKM

This is an absolute bombshell, and magnificent work by NYT. It also contains the platonic ideal of NYT both-sides-ing...

Do we really need a lefty version of minimizing the scale and impact of the pandemic? Nobody is arguing that COVID is a unique cause of all our problems, but it ripped open the scars of the financial crisis, particularly exacerbating the decline in trust of institutions.

And if you can afford $5K to sit your family in the upper deck for a C-tier group stage match, you can afford another $600 for train tickets so that NJ taxpayers don't have to subsidize this bullshit any further.

After the farcical ticketing process I'm all for making the WC experience so disgusting and venal that we never have to deal with FIFA again.

How a $150 train ticket caused a fight between FIFA and New Jersey’s governor The hiked cost of an 18-mile rail journey is at the heart of a heated dispute between local government and global soccer's governing body.

A "hold my beer" moment after Boston announced $95 World Cup bus service to Foxboro.
www.nytimes.com/athletic/720...

Top of Trump's proposed arch is the statue of Liberty holding a shield and with huge angel wings

Good grief.

Good location for all your brushfires

What NYT treats as antisemitic (Mamdani, college protesters) or doesn't (CPAC groypers, Hegseth) is just a reflection of what antisemitism advocacy groups prioritize. NYT reflects as much as drives elite conversation.

Vermeer's Woman Holding a Balance in the National Gallery. Possibly the most sublime painting residing in America. A pregnant woman holds a balance, standing in front of a painting of the Last Judgment.

2026 is an AI image of Trump exploding from her like a xenomorph.

Yeah, you're right. Buckle up, this is gonna suck.

We are going to end up with 2 parties that think inflation is worse than unemployment instead of 1, and that will be very very bad.

In addition, there isn't a lot of trust in government to deliver solutions. So back to the original point, it is much more effective to open the conversation with taxing the rich, and accountability for people who are exploiting the system. 2/2

Closely related: "Affordability" is a huge issue but 1) people aren't really into a lot of the solutions, eg building more housing and 2) prices are never coming DOWN for stuff like healthcare and groceries and good luck messaging on "bending the cost curve" 1/

You could absolutely run a national campaign on a torches-and-pitchforks message of consequences for political corruption, tax evasion, white collar crime.

Sunny Side of the Mountain - Sam Bush, Fleck, Rice, Douglas - 1988 YouTube video by ricgrass

A belated Happy Birthday to @sambushband.bsky.social. Accept no substitutes.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V5J...

That is amazing. "Brushfire" was on the way out as I was coming in, and I never saw "Quickie."

The ask is not really for Democrats to "campaign on" different issues, it's for Democrats to take different positions, most notably on trans rights.

Mamdani's Tax the Rich Agenda Isn't Spooking Wall Street Record jobs and fat real estate leases make finance the No. 1 industry again.

Oh
www.thecity.nyc/2026/04/14/w...

I'm still just so tickled by this small intersection of Orbán and Cantor, both of whom can get bent.

Orbán's best bet for regime survival — for returning to power — wasn't staging a doomed January 6-style putsch in the face of overwhelming defeat.

It was retreating, and doing everything he can to preserve regime elements that would allow for a return to competitive authoritarianism in the future.

Eric Cantor says what?

Opinion: Why your electric bill is so high – and how the state comptroller can lower it If we lower the profit margin that utility monopolies are guaranteed to earn, we lower electricity bills.

www.cityandstateny.com/opinion/2026...

Editors note that the "1.8B company with 2 employees and a ton of AI" story was in fact about using AI to enable a massive fraud, and they should have probably said that the business was the target of multiple legal and regulatory actions

Better A17 than nowhere!

NYT hed "Israel complicates Trump's push for peace deal with Iran" The piece has a grammatical error in the first graf.

"Complicates" doing some heavy lifting, and there's a copyediting error in the first graf.

Amirite @zacmccrary.bsky.social

Political sickos eating up these Murtha references

Watched splashdown with my son and it was the first "remember where you were" moment we have had like that.